Vanguard: Saga Of Heroes Interview with Brad McQuaid at HomeLan Fed

Sigil Games' Co-Founder is quizzed on a number of topics pertinent to its fantasy-themed persistent world title.

By IGN Staff

Another article that appeared in the wee hours this morning, this Vanguard interview asks Sigil's Brad McQuaid to reflect on the ongoing creation of the massively multiplayer title:

As for developing Vanguard, it's in more ways the same as developing projects in the past than different. I think the differences probably are in areas where we are able to rely more on our experience and so it's easier to make certain decisions with more confidence, or knowing already how we want to approach a certain problem. I think doing another fantasy MMOG also gives us confidence because a project of this size and the ambitious nature of it all can be pretty daunting. But then every time we encounter one of these predicaments, we can look back and find something analogous in our past that we got through.

One example would be the city of New Targonor, the capitol city on the starting continent of Thestra in Vanguard. It's huge. It's really huge. It's probably the largest 3d art asset ever to be put into a game. At first we worried about memory footprints, and then framerate, poly count, fill rate, etc. But we could all look back and think about similar scenarios working on EQ and other MMOGs. For example, at one point we were unsure that Qeynos would be possible. I remember us doing all sorts of optimizations and such to make Qeynos run on the hardware available at the time, yet now it's one of the more simplistic and claustrophobic zones in EQ. So we remind each other that yeah, New Targonor is ambitious and pretty unprecedented, but it's not only going to be fine, but it's going to probably look almost simple when compared to the dungeons and cities we build next year in some intermediate or advanced region of the game.

Presently some 20 months into its development and categorized as 'post-alpha' by Brad, Vanguard: Saga Of Heroes is scheduled to be the first release from Sigil Games, although a concrete date has yet to be set. - Annihilator